CONTINUITY BY SURPRISE Explaining Institutional Stability ... · of surprises is the genuine...

Latin American Research Review, Vol. 51, No. 1. © 2016 by the Latin American Studies Association.

C O N T I N U I T Y B Y S U R P R I S E

Explaining Institutional Stability in Contemporary Peru

Alberto VergaraHarvard University

Daniel EncinasPontifi cia Universidad Católica del Perú

Como un barco que sale a alta mar, encontrará tormentas, pero lo importante es la continui-

dad en el mando del Estado.

Ollanta Humala, Peruvian president

Abstract: In the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, Latin America experienced a so-called left turn that sought either to reform or eliminate the neoliberal institutions estab-lished during the 1980s and 1990s. However, although Peru has electoral, economic, and social processes similar to those of its neighbors, the neoliberal institutions established in Peru by the 1993 Constitution remain fi rmly in place. This article aims to understand the mechanisms sustaining Peru’s neoliberal regime since its creation. Why have these institutions survived and grown in strength in a regional environment that has been hostile to neoliberal legacies? The article answers that question, emphasizing the evo-lution of the balance of power between the precarious Peruvian political class and the empowered technocrats and bureaucrats within the state. The reformist politicians are too weak and amateurish to challenge the technobureaucrats within the state. Moreover, the article analyzes the different strategies deployed by technocrats and bureaucrats in order to ensure the continuity and stability of the neoliberal regime and its policies. Theoretically, the article suggests that institutional stability can arise from a daily pro-cess gradually shaped by actors and their strategies.

During the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, many presidents who cam-

paigned as leftists unexpectedly became neoliberals once they reached offi ce.

Susan Stokes (2001) described such switching as “neoliberalism by surprise.”

But a decade later, in much of Latin America, left-wing candidates had begun

to govern as left-wing presidents attempting either to reform or eliminate what

Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa called “la larga noche neoliberal,” and “Stokes’s

paradox” vanished.1 Nevertheless, one country, Peru, remains trapped in Stokes’s

For their helpful comments at different moments in this research we want to thank Steven Levitsky,

Jorge Domínguez, Frances Hagopian, Kurt Weyland, Eduardo Dargent, Hillel Soifer, Juan Pablo Luna,

Richard Snyder, and Marylia Cruz. Any inaccuracies remain our sole responsibility. This article was

accepted for publication on March 20, 2014.

1. On the left turn see Cameron and Hershberg 2010; Weyland, Madrid, and Hunter 2010; and Le-

vitsky and Roberts 2011.

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160 Latin American Research Review

paradox despite going through electoral, economic, and social processes similar

to its neighbors.

The neoliberal institutions established by the 1993 Peruvian constitution re-

main intact despite the fact that in the post-Fujimori era (2001–2013) a candidate

openly defending the neoliberal structures has never won an election. That is the

surprising continuity. In a country of traditionally weak institutions, the absence

of surprises is the genuine surprise (Vergara 2012). Why have these institutions

survived and grown in strength in an environment that elsewhere has been hos-

tile to neoliberal legacies?

Peru’s booming economy is one possible answer. Due to high international

commodity prices, Peru enjoyed the fastest economic growth in South America

during the last decade, doubling its gross domestic product (GDP) and reducing

poverty by an impressive amount. No rational actor arriving in offi ce, goes the ar-

gument, would dare to alter the institutional framework that creates such wealth

(de Althaus 2011). However, this explanation is not fully satisfactory. Although ac-

knowledging that growth is inseparable from political trends, the contemporary

comparative literature has noted that booming economies and their increased

revenues have elsewhere actually driven the left turn (Murillo, Oliveros, and

Vaishnav 2011; Weyland 2009). Booming natural resources in Latin America have

radicalized, not moderated, presidents elected as neoliberal challengers. Why do

we not see this effect on antiestablishment politicians in Peru?

A second possible explanation could be the “enduring capture of the state”

by Peruvian economic elites who rule indirectly from their seats in bank offi ces

(Durand 2010). Without denying the existence of veto players in some parts of

the Peruvian state, we argue that such a description overstates the direct control

of the private sector. As Dargent (2015) argues, since the beginning of the 1990s

Peruvian businessmen have been suspicious of a technocracy that was “too in-

sulated” from their interests. Moreover, in recent years the state imposed several

measures against the wishes of important private interests, indicating that such a

description is inaccurate.2 This business-community explanation obscures crucial

political and institutional determinants behind Peru’s stability.

A third possible explanation focuses on key political actors. According to

Cameron (2011, 376), Peruvian president Alan García (2006–2011) “could have

governed from the left, but he chose not to. . . . García embraced the neoliberal

economic model.” Although President Ollanta Humala does not seem to have

embraced neoliberalism ideologically, he nevertheless has embraced it in prac-

tice. Since the neoliberal model has remained strong, there must be other factors

beyond the individual agency of key actors. Moreover, two of the most recent

three Peruvian presidents, Alejandro Toledo and Humala, were political outsid-

ers. Humala especially was a fi erce antiestablishment radical. The literature on

the Latin American left suggests that such outsiders are crucial factors in the es-

2. For example, after the election of President Humala mining companies agreed to pay more than

one billion dollars as an extra contribution; private pension companies had to reduce their commissions

by 66 percent; and reforms in taxing capacity have been successful in increasing tax collection. Those

are not the sort of reforms that we should see in a “kidnapped state.”

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CONTINUITY BY SURPRISE 161

tablishment of radical policies to dismantle neoliberal structures (Kaufman 2011).

Additionally, Peru lacks strong parties. According to many studies, political par-

ties account for the main difference between the populist and the socialist lefts

(Flores-Macías 2012). Functional party systems moderate polities (Brazil, Chile,

Uruguay), while polities lacking them fall prey to caudillos aiming to establish

plebiscitarian anti- neoliberal regimes (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador). Yet despite a

collapsed party system and antiestablishment outsiders, Peru remains fi rmly on

the neo liberal track.

All these explanations are to some degree related to Peruvian continuity; yet

this article seeks to emphasize the dynamic relationship between sets of pro-

continuity and pro-change actors in Peru over time. We argue that actors within

the state—technocrats and bureaucrats—have progressively gained power in

the years since the 1993 Constitution, while politicians have dramatically lost it.

This dynamic has evolved to the point where reformist politicians simply can-

not control this new technobureaucratic cadre within the state, who have mas-

tered the complexities of administrative procedures and ensure the survival of

the neoliberal regime. This occurs for two reasons. First, the weak political class

does not detect how technocrats and bureaucrats recurrently and silently shield

the neoliberal regime against politicians. Second, when politicians do clash with

bureaucrats, most of the time bureaucrats prevail. In Peru, we hear the echo of a

recent diagnosis of American politics: “The center of the story is not elections but

policy” (Hacker and Pierson 2010, 172). In order to show this gradual process, we

highlight three main strategies used to shield and expand the neoliberal regime

from within the state. Our research is based on twenty interviews with politi-

cians, technocrats, and bureaucrats and on original data on the careers of minis-

ters and main bureaucrats between 2000 and 2012. Explanations centered either

on economics or on the direct control of economic elites drastically miss these

political and institutional determinants of Peruvian stability.

SURPRISING INSTITUTIONAL STABILITY

In this article we deal with the stability of a neoliberal citizenship regime. Fol-

lowing Esping-Andersen (1999), we do not treat the neoliberal regime as a mere

economic regime but as a broader way of structuring state, market, and citizenry

(see also Streeck and Thelen 2005, 9–16).3 In contrast to corporatist and social-

democratic regimes, neoliberalism’s prioritization of private activity to provide

goods and services, the retreat of state activity, and the marginalization of social

rights (Yashar 2005, 47–49) give way to “a signifi cant change in the meaning of

citizenship within the states” (Centeno and Cohen 2012, 325). As Centeno and

Cohen (2012) state, neoliberalism may pervade different levels of analysis ranging

from communities of experts and policies to culture and beliefs.

In the Peruvian case, we deal with the neoliberal regime embodied in the 1993

Constitution promoted by Fujimori’s administration, a constitution that came to

3. We must stress that we use “neoliberal” analytically, and not normatively.

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substitute the old Keynesian or populist regimes and policies following World

War II by stating in Article 60 that public participation in the economic sphere

must be only subsidiary. This constitutional norm is the cornerstone of the neo-

liberal citizenship regime and its derived policies that have progressively taken

root in Peru.4

Two decades later, the institution remains fi rmly in place. The survival and

consolidation of the Peruvian regime is surprising for several reasons. First, it

goes against the country’s political tradition. Peru is a weakly institutionalized

country where the rules usually change “radically and frequently” (Levitsky

and Murillo 2009); constitutions accumulate endlessly, shifting from centralized

to decentralized forms of government and swinging between authoritarianism

and democracy; and law enforcement is ineffective or nonexistent. Second, from

a comparative perspective, we are surprised to fi nd stability in Peru, because de-

spite sharing many of the main factors usually highlighted as drivers of backlash

against neoliberalism (like strong antisystem politicians, party system collapse,

and economic boom) the neoliberal regime remains intact. Finally, stability is sur-

prising because there have been political moments when the institution could

have been signifi cantly reformed but was not. In 2000, neoliberalism resisted

the humiliating collapse of Fujimori’s administration. In 2006, Alan García and

APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) won the presidential elec-

tion on a platform of “responsible change,” criticizing the 1993 Constitution and

the neoliberal model, especially the free trade agreement between Peru and the

United States. And last but defi nitively not least, current president Ollanta Hu-

mala, the most antiestablishment fi gure in the past decade in Peruvian politics

and repeatedly categorized as an anti-system and populist candidate, was elected

on a platform deploying a bellicose rhetoric against neoliberalism (especially free

trade agreements) and promising a gran transformación that included abolishing

the 1993 Constitution to return to the magna carta of 1979.5 However, Humala as

president would have been at home with the leaders of the 1980s and 1990s that

Stokes identifi ed. He has not mentioned the idea of altering, much less abolishing,

the 1993 Constitution since taking offi ce and has signed a major new free trade

agreement with the European Union. Despite the fact that openly pro-continuity

presidential candidates have never won an election, the neoliberal regime has

survived and remains fi rmly in place. How can we explain this stability?

The literature usually conceptualizes institutional persistence in terms of long

periods of stability punctuated by pathbreaking convulsive moments. Examples

are the seminal theories about frozen party systems (Lipset and Rokkan 1967),

the lasting effects of strategies of labor incorporation in mid-twentieth-century

Latin America (Collier and Collier 1991), and the long-term consequences of early

choices about federalism on state formation (Ziblatt 2006). These theories fi t into a

broader model of “punctuated equilibrium” in which “earlier parts of a sequence

4. We must also stress that we do not refer to the “political regime”—the rules that regulate access to

power (Mazzuca 2007).

5. Plan de Gobierno: 2011–2016, pp. 7, 34. See http://e.elcomercio.pe/66/doc/plandegobiernogana

peru.pdf.

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matter much more than later parts” (Pierson 2000, 263). As a consequence, this ap-

proach tends to downplay what happens after these formative stages.

In contrast to this “punctuated” way of understanding institutional develop-

ment there is another way that gives less relevance to the early stages or at least

acknowledges that “the processes responsible for the genesis of an institution are

different from the processes responsible for the reproduction of the institution”

(Mahoney 2000, 512). Then, the endurance of an institution might be less the de-

terministic product of a critical juncture than the result of a slow process through

which actors succeed in keeping the institution alive despite other actors who

would like to reform or eliminate it (Weyland 2008). After all, the actors that

launch an institution are not necessarily the ones that develop it (Streeck and

Thelen 2005). Institutions take root and survive in a dynamic, gradual, and contin-

gent process in which pro-change and pro-continuity actors constantly struggle

(Mahoney and Thelen 2010). Therefore, institutional stability does not necessarily

derive from the early stages of the institution.

Although we do not seek to resolve the abstract debate about how institutions

evolve, both literatures are useful to propose a temporal framework of analysis

that distinguishes between the origins of the institution (1991–1993) and its devel-

opment (2000 onward), without assuming that such development is a derivative

process of early choices.6 Therefore, to understand how the neoliberal regime in

Peru acquired continuity and stability, we focus on two blocks of actors at those

two different moments.

Our two groups of actors are politicians, on the one hand, and technocrats and

bureaucrats, on the other. In a democracy, institutional reforms require the initia-

tive and support of political coalitions (Hall 2010). In the case of a weak or absent

political class, the substantive reform or replacement of an institution is unlikely.

We consider a political class to be weak when political parties do not receive a sig-

nifi cant percentage of the vote; elected authorities have short tenures; and politi-

cal vehicles and their leaders are disconnected from social bases. The absence or

weakness of a political class constitutes a propitious context for the reproduction

of an institution (in this case the neoliberal regime) but does not explain why and

how the institution successfully survives crises, reproduces, and gets stronger.

That process of institutional development depends on the second block of actors:

those within the state. We refer to an important new alliance of technocrats and

bureaucrats within the Peruvian state. In studying this block of actors we focus

on two dimensions.

First, we underline the sources of their authority. Since the Peruvian bureau-

cracy is by no means Weberian, not even in simple operational terms (Evans and

Rauch 1999), its power and legitimacy do not come from the formal law but from

two dilute sources. On the ideological front, it comes from what Peter Hall classi-

cally described as a social policy paradigm, the neoliberal paradigm (Hall 1993).

The core of the new regime (its institutions and the people related to the eco-

6. Since we deal with a recent institution that has lasted just a couple of decades we avoid using terms

such as “critical juncture” or “path-dependence” usually employed to explain macrohistorical phenom-

ena; we lack enough historical distance to use those terms properly.

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nomic institution) was always solidly committed to the new economic principles.

But ideas do not matter in a vacuum; they become infl uential when they take

root in social contexts or become institutionalized (Hall 1997, 186). The interna-

tional beliefs embodied in transnational intellectual institutions, fi nancial insti-

tutions, and especially American universities played a main role in socializing

people, diffusing ideas, and building “epistemic communities” (Montecinos and

Markoff 2001; Sikkink 1991; Davis Cross 2013). The epistemic literature shows that

in order to have success, ideas must be completed and empowered by sharing

networks and socialization, which constitutes the second source of authority we

analyze in this article, the progressive emergence of an esprit de corps between

technocrats and bureaucrats forging an alliance based on sharing discourse,

practices, manners, and common interests that have gradually taken root and ex-

panded within the state (Centeno 1997). And, as in other contexts, technocrats

and bureaucrats in the Peruvian ministries and agencies have tended to perceive

their ideas and principles as the objectively correct ones for administering the

state (Bourdieu 1989; Silva 2009). In contexts of low institutionalization like Peru

(Levitsky and Murillo 2009, 2012), these ideational and informal sources of power

and legitimacy are far more relevant than the formal law.

In addition to their sources of authority, we analyze the strategies bureaucrats

and technocrats follow to defend and reproduce the institution. We focus on three

main strategies: how they successfully adapt the institution to new political con-

texts (Thelen 2003); how members of the “core” of the neoliberal agencies progres-

sively infi ltrate new agencies (Ginsberg and Shefter 1990; Teles 2010); and how

they deploy candados (locks) in organizations and policies to block future reforms.

It is the accumulation of these kinds of minor (and daily) strategies that permits

the survival and the deepening of the broader neoliberal regime.

To sum up, our account of how the Peruvian neoliberal regime gained stability

in Peru makes room for the origins of the institution but also highlights its crucial

development in the 2000s. We argue that the constant weakness of the Peruvian

political class (Levitsky 2013; Vergara 2012) creates the environment that permits

the reproduction of the institution, and that technobureaucrats actually shield,

maintain, and strengthen the institution in gradual ways. Crucial in our account

are the ways that actors have adapted the institution to new political contexts, and

the strategies they employ to keep it alive and to institutionalize it. This does not

derive directly from the origin of the institution.

THE ORIGIN OF THE NEOLIBERAL INSTITUTIONS

The establishment of neoliberal institutions during the late 1980s and early

1990s was a crucial moment for Latin American countries that led to a new critical

juncture (Roberts 2012). In Peru this was particularly acute for at least a couple of

reasons. First, the response to the economic crisis in the second half of the 1980s

displayed impressive levels of mismanagement. The country descended into an

abyss of productive paralysis, unstoppable hyperinfl ation, and the collapse of

basic state capacities (Weyland 2002, chapter 6). The threat of the Shining Path

also contributed to the sense of general crisis; the end of the 1980s constituted

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“a national trauma” in Peru (Leiteritz 2010, 119–122). Consequently the new re-

gime was built in reaction to the institutions and people that had created such a

disaster. In addition, the neoliberal experiment arrived in a particularly authori-

tarian manner. In 1990 the Fujimori government introduced the fi rst neoliberal

measures, but the more substantive set of neoliberal reforms came after the April

1992 auto-golpe that, amid widespread popular support, effectively shut down the

judiciary, the constitutional court, the national congress, and the regional gov-

ernments. Lacking a political party, Fujimori garnered the support of unelected

technocrats and the military (Mauceri 1995). The Peruvian political class was al-

most totally replaced between 1992 and 1993. Many traditional parties declined

to participate in the 1993 constituent assembly, and those that did received less

than 10 percent of the vote. In the presidential election of 1995, when Fujimori was

reelected with 64 percent of the vote, no traditional party reached 5 percent. New

institutional arrangements are more likely to endure when those who implement

them have clearly defeated their principal opponents (Przeworski 1991). The au-

thoritarian origin of the neoliberal institutions was crucial to their future stabil-

ity since it helped destroy the traditional parties that had created the previous

regime (embodied in the Constitution of 1979), which were the main opposition

to the new one.7

Meanwhile, within the state, technocrats and nonpolitical ministers (usu-

ally businessmen) forged an alliance in order to implement neoliberal reforms

(Arce 2005). Especially under Fujimori’s second minister of economy, Carlos Bo-

loña (1991–1993), a radical new set of neoliberal policies were adopted that went

beyond even what international institutions were advocating at the time (Dar-

gent 2015). In this context, the new ministers found a way to pay competitive sala-

ries to a new cohort of young professionals brought into the state from the private

sector. This was the fi rst generation of technocrats in the Peruvian state.8 This new

group of professionals was the beginning of a long line of informally empowered

technocrats and bureaucrats that have been crucial to the regime’s resilience.

In much the same way as Centeno (1997) identifi ed in the Mexican case (but

much less institutionalized and without ties to a hegemonic party), these new ac-

tors and ideas were empowered by informal institutions. The new regime brought

a powerful “social policy paradigm” (Hall 1993)—neoliberalism. This ideological

capital proved to be resilient and prospered during the next two decades. Leiteritz

(2010) argues that Peruvian technocrats are ideologically far more neoliberal than

their Colombian counterparts.

However, ideas become important only when they are embodied in networks

and institutionalized. That is what happened in the early 1990s; the new ideas

were embodied by a new cohort within the state. In ministries linked to economic

activity and the so-called islands of effi ciency, this new cohort started to share

spaces, vocabulary, and manners, and an esprit de corps gradually emerged.

These sociological forces are crucial since the incipient new group of technocrats

and bureaucrats within the state was, and still is, not formally empowered by

7. On the collapse of Peruvian political parties see Tanaka 1998; Levitsky and Cameron 2003.

8. Mayén Ugarte, interview, Lima, December 2012.

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the law. As Dargent (2015) suggests, the authoritarian origins of Peru’s neoliberal

regime did not give state offi cials the incentive to formalize their power, because

technocrats were suffi ciently insulated due to the authoritarian context of 1992–

1995. As a result, the Peruvian state has a dual bureaucracy. One is an example of

what Grindle (2010) calls a “phantom civil service,” which plays no relevant role in

policy making; the second, in contrast, includes powerful actors within the state

whose authority does not come from the legal order but from socialization and

the shared policy paradigm. It is informal politics (see Radnitz 2011). According

to several interviewees, this cohesion fi rst emerged when a group of technocrats

from economy-related agencies met to transform the Peruvian state.9 An alliance

was forged between the Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas (MEF), Banco Cen-

tral de Reserva, and newly empowered agencies that oversaw the economy.10 The

main proof that a new group was emerging was the retention of Minister Boloña’s

two vice-ministers by his successor, Jorge Camet (1993–1998). By the end of the

initial period, such insulated policies paid off: hyperinfl ation vanished and eco-

nomic growth resumed.11

In summary, the formal regime represented by the 1993 Constitution was ad-

opted under conditions of strong popular support and political autonomy for pol-

icy makers. Fujimori liquidated both the preexisting institutional structure and

the political actors that had founded and supported it. It is not surprising that

such a period has been depicted as a “critical juncture” (Tanaka 2001). The main

challenges to the new order were to come in the next decade after the fall of the

Fujimori government. Actors within the state had to employ several strategies to

defend and reproduce the institution against politicians who, despite their anti-

neoliberal rhetoric, never succeeded in defeating the defenders of the regime.

CRISIS AND FIRST ADAPTATION

As Levitsky and Murillo (2009) state, what differentiates between institutional

endurance and institutional stability is the ability to survive crises. The neolib-

eral regime has prospered in Peru only after overcoming crises that could have

partially altered or drastically reformed it. The main crisis was the collapse of Fu-

jimori’s government in 2000. There were four reasons why this was a particularly

acute crisis for the regime: the corruption scandals surrounding the collapse; the

mobilizations during the third, illegal election of 2000; the accompanying eco-

nomic stagnation; and the clash between technocrats and fujimorista politicians

over economic policy. This was the sort of crisis that ousted presidents elsewhere

at the same time (Bolivia in 2003, Ecuador in 2000, and Argentina in 2001), leading

to major political changes. Economically, although Peru’s economy had grown in

the mid-1990s, GDP fell 0.7 percent in 1998 and then experienced meager growth

9. Laura Calderón, current vice-minister of economy, interview, December 2012; and Emma León de

la Fuente, former secretaria general in several ministries, interview, December 2012.

10. Among them were Superintendencia Nacional de Tributos (SUNAT); Instituto Nacional de De-

fensa de la Competencia y de la Propiedad Intelectual (INDECOPI), and Superintendencia de Banca y

Seguros.

11. The defeat of the Shining Path was another success for Fujimori’s government.

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of less than 2 percent in the following three years.12 The clash between the differ-

ent factions highlights the criticality of this time period. Research shows that by

the end of the 1990s, technocrats’ strength was not autonomous but relied heavily

on politicians (Conaghan 1998). In 1999, Victor Joy Way, a political fujimorista,

was appointed to head the usually neoliberal MEF to ensure Fujimori’s reelection

against the technocrats’ will (Dargent 2015). The collapse of Fujimori’s govern-

ment was a critical moment for the neoliberal regime.

The regime survived, but not because of its original design or because of the

inertia that emanated from a “critical juncture.” Rather, it survived because pro-

continuity actors successfully adapted the institution to a new political context.

First, the nine-month transition government of Valentín Paniagua appointed

Javier Silva Ruete, an old “technopol,” as economic minister.13 Surprisingly, many

of the technocrats and bureaucrats closest to the Fujimori administration retained

their positions and in some cases were promoted. The transition government and

the new minister of economy kept both of Fujimori’s last vice-ministers Javier

Abugattás and Alfredo Jaililie. In addition, Silva Ruete appointed Beatriz Boza, a

prominent technocrat who had launched many of the neoliberal initiatives of the

1990s, as his chief of cabinet. What is important is that all these appointees shared

the policy paradigm and socialization of the 1990s. In addition, they launched

democratic reforms to correct the corrupt, authoritarian “deviations” of Fujimori’s

government, adapting the regime to a new democratic context by championing

government transparency and anticlientelism initiatives.

The process of adaptation continued under the Toledo administration (2001–

2006). President Toledo had no party, suffered very low levels of popularity, had

no experience with the state, and was haunted by the threat of impeachment.

Under these conditions, Toledo gave free reign to key technocrats and bureaucrats

who made the neoliberal institution endure. He appointed Roberto Dagnino, to-

day former vice president of the World Bank, as prime minister and Pedro Pablo

Kuczynski, another powerful technopol, as subsequent minister of economy and

prime minister. Kuczynski essentially became the administration’s strongman.

Toledo is the fi rst example of a recurring pattern in post-Fujimori Peru: weak poli-

ticians ceding the reins of government to neoliberal technocrats.

In the critical years of 2000 and 2001, the neoliberal regime’s sources of author-

ity were validated. The policy paradigm was maintained and cleansed of corrupt

fujimorista politicians and clientelist policies, but the appointment of big names

of the international technocracy protected the main policies of the 1990s and the

circle of technocrats and bureaucrats who had initially implemented them. In ad-

dition, in 2002, Toledo closed the Ministerio de la Presidencia, a crucial force in

the fujimorista executive, because of its political involvement in Fujimori’s popu-

larity and reelection. After that, the neoliberal MEF became the indisputable epi-

center of Peruvian executive power. Hence, the new democratic period functioned

as a sort of second institutional origin by validating the authority of technocrats

12. Data from Banco Central de Reserva.

13. According to Domínguez (1997, 7), technopols are “a variant of technocrats. In addition to being

technocrats . . . technopols are political leaders.”

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working within the state and creating the mechanisms that would preserve

that authority in the future. The conditions that permitted the survival of the

institution—weak politicians trusting well-skilled people within the state—set

the path for the endurance and strengthening of the neoliberal regime until today.

This second origin, and the process it launched, is even more important to our

understanding of Peruvian political continuity than the early 1990s.

OBTAINING STABILITY: ACTORS AND STRATEGIES

The emergence of the informal bureaucracy is a crucial but understudied

change in Peru. While some research has highlighted the role of technocrats in

contemporary Peru (Dargent 2015), scholarship has not focused on what we call

informal bureaucrats. These are not technocrats that design policies or prepare

major institutional initiatives but a new layer of people with powerful admin-

istrative knowledge of the state’s legal and formal procedures. Although they

can be mistaken for technocrats, they function as bureaucrats. Since they are not

properly empowered by a civil service law or tenured in any way, we highlight

their informal character. Their sources of political weight are the policy para-

digm, their socialization, and the resulting esprit de corps. The main informal

bureaucrats are the secretarios generales (SGs). The SG is the appointee within each

ministry who holds the highest authority in administrative matters and whose

formal position is below only the minister and vice-ministers. That is, SGs and

their administrative teams—lawyers, accountants, and managers—are the ones

that guide the work of the minister through the legal apparatus.

Technocrats and informal bureaucrats have forged an alliance to control re-

formist politicians. Technocrats, SGs, and their teams have become the Weberian

carriers of the regime, its policies, and its ideas. They preserve the regime not just

in moments of crisis but on a daily basis. They are capable of doing this fi rst be-

cause of the balance of power between politicians and informal bureaucrats, and

second because of the strategies they have developed to strengthen their position.

We will examine these two phenomena in turn.

ACTORS

In the words of the minister of social inclusion, Carolina Trivelli, “You can-

not move within the state with an SG who has no previous experience in that

position.”14 To assess the increasing importance of these informal bureaucrats, we

examined the work of all 221 SG terms in eighteen ministries between 2000 and

2012 and observed how stable these critical actors were across the state. In 2001,

43 percent of SGs had previous experience in that position; by 2012 the number

had risen to 61 percent. That is, their sphere of infl uence has substantially in-

creased throughout Peru’s ministries. Their increasing strength comes from the

knowledge and the social networks that progressively spread to new actors and

14. Carolina Trivelli, interview, Lima, December 2012. After this article was fi nished Trivelli left the

ministry.

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sectors within the state. This began with fi rst wave of technocrats in the 1990s, and

has grown into an effi cient informal network that permits bureaucrats to move

from one ministry to the next. These bureaucrats see themselves as the guardians

of Peru’s success. The group is decidedly pro-continuity, seeking to preserve the

“institutional memory” of each ministry.15 For them, “to do things in the right way

means doing them as they were done earlier.”16 For technocrats and bureaucrats,

nothing is more dangerous than a politician. There is an esprit de corps among

them; they support each other and move across ministries with a security they ob-

tain from a network of contacts rather than from the law.17 Although formally they

only have administrative prerogatives, according to one of Humala’s short-lived

leftist vice-ministers, the SGs are, in fact, the ones who tell the minister “what

he can do and what he cannot do.”18 Bureaucratic knowledge is not only used for

administrative purposes. According to a current Humala minister who requested

anonymity, the best way to get rid of distrusted politicians is through the bureau-

cracy: “The SG sets a trap, the minister falls for it, and then they expel him.” No

other formula captures so succinctly the rise of the increasingly self-reinforcing

dynamic in which empowered bureaucrats easily defeat weak reformists.

The Peruvian state now has a cohort of experienced and better-trained tech-

nocrats.19 Between 1990 and 2000, only two out of the six economy ministers had

studied at an international university and two had experience in international

fi nancial organizations. Between 2000 and 2012, all ten economy ministers had in-

ternational degrees, and nine had previous experience with international organi-

zations.20 Outside the MEF, the technocratic trend follows a similar path. For this

study, we examined the evolution of the proportion of technical versus political

ministers in the administrations elected since Fujimori.21 The results support our

hypotheses: during Alejandro Toledo’s administration (2001–2006), technical min-

isters accounted for 49 percent of the total; this rose to 61 percent during García’s

administration (2006–2011) and then 66 percent under Humala (2011–2012).

The alliance of bureaucrats and technocrats can impose its will not because it

15. María Lila Iwasaki, former SG in several ministries, interview, July 2012.

16. Mayén Ugarte, interview, December 2012.

17. Verónica Zavala, former minister of transportation and important functionary in different state

agencies for the last two decades (currently at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington,

DC), interview, December 2012.

18. Eduardo Ballón, former vice-minister of Ministerio de la Mujer, interview, June 2012.

19. Interestingly, in some cases the division between bureaucrats and technocrats blurs. For example,

the current minister of foreign affairs, Eda Rivas, used to be the justice SG under Toledo; she then was

minister of justice and now has become canciller. From administrative duties she went on to a very

prominent political position.

20. Data from Dargent 2012.

21. We analyzed all the ministers in each ministry from the Toledo government (2001) to the third

Humala cabinet (June 2013), a total of 262 terms. We defi ne technical minister as the one whose recogni-

tion comes from his/her high level of expertise (Centeno and Silva 1998). A “political minister” is the

person that in the last ten years was either militant in a political party, a candidate, or was elected to

a popular elected position. A “businessman minister” is one who has either had management/execu-

tive positions in the private sector, is the owner of an enterprise, or has had important responsibilities

in business organization (gremio empresarial). Interestingly, the percentage of business ministers has

remained more or less stable over time though increased slightly: 12 percent under Toledo’s administra-

tion, 14 percent under García’s, and 19 percent under Humala.

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is exceptionally strong but because politicians and parties are extremely weak. In

the last presidential election, the fi ve front-runners lacked proper political parties.

The winner, Ollanta Humala, had never held public offi ce before. In this context,

it is easy to understand why several technocrats and bureaucrats we interviewed

declared that Humala is the kind of leader functional to “our agenda”: having no

party, no experience, no strong business community support, and no ideas about

what to do with the state, he must trust “us.”22

This weakness characterizes the entire political class. It is present, for instance,

in the crucial legislature, through which any major reform should pass. Congress-

men in Peru are increasingly irrelevant. The legislature has stopped creating sub-

stantive legislation, which is now given by the executive through different legal

mechanisms (Valladares 2012). The percentage of returning congressmen dimin-

ishes every year, creating a congress of amateur politicians. Between the 2006 and

2011 congresses, only 12 percent of incumbents were reelected. Out of the 32 per-

cent of congressional seats Humala’s coalition won in 2011, over 70 percent were

fi lled by fi rst-time legislators. Under such circumstances, the executive, especially

its main ministry, the MEF, has increasingly become the legislative engine of the

country. Other political forces in Peru suffer similar precariousness. The vener-

able APRA, despite its tradition and control of the presidency between 2006 and

2011, has just 4 out of 130 congressmen. It is worth mentioning that the Peruvian

civil society is also highly fragmented and uncoordinated, which increases the

diffi culty of altering neoliberal institutional arrangements (Huber and Stephens

2012). Although this variable is beyond the scope of this article, such weakness

undeniably contributes to the general weakness of the political class and reform

attempts.23 In such a general context, technocrats and informal bureaucrats are

able to reproduce the neoliberal regime.

Such political weakness has progressively reduced the number of politicians

in Peruvian cabinets. Using the data collected about post-Fujimori ministers

(2000–2013), we found that 27 percent of cabinet appointees under Toledo and

24 percent under García were politicians. This trend reaches its lowest level with

Humala’s third cabinet, in which only the minister for women, Ana Jara, of nine-

teen ministers, is a political minister. Two are businesspeople and the sixteen re-

maining are technical ministers. Paradoxically, such unique depoliticization of

the executive in the context of Latin America was not reached with a right-wing

liberal technopol but with a populist outsider.24 Without opposition from any of

22. Obviously, they all requested anonymity. A couple of interviewees even mentioned that the situ-

ation was very similar to the early Fujimori administration: a lot of autonomy for technical ministries,

while the president and his closest allies are primarily interested in the army domain.

23. On the fragmented civil society see Panfi chi 2011.

24. According to Amorim (2006), in a survey of twelve Latin American countries between 1978 and

2004, the average of politicians holding ministries is 78 percent. If we compare current Peru with the

more recent new left governments, it appears as a peculiar case of depoliticization. Out of the cur-

rent twenty-six of Dilma Roussef’s ministers, twenty-two come from her coalition and ten from the PT

(Partido dos Trabalhadores). In the fi rst cabinet of Michelle Bachelet (2006), seventeen out of twenty

ministers were politicians from the Concertación.

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these potential checks, technocrats and informal bureaucrats are able to maintain

the neoliberal regime.

STRATEGIES

So far we have shown how the balance of power within Peruvian governments

progressively shifted toward experts and how the relevance of politicians gradu-

ally vanished. Now we turn to the most visible strategies by which technobureau-

crats carry out the reproduction of the regime.

Candados (locks)

Several interviewees mentioned that the best mechanism to ensure the pres-

ervation of the neoliberal regime is the inclusion of candados (locks) in public

policies, trade agreements, and internal regulations. The main lock preventing

regime change is the previously mentioned Article 60 of the Peruvian constitu-

tion. That article means any attempt to alter the regime and its policies can be la-

belled “unconstitutional.” Another important example of this strategy is found in

the successful conditional cash transfer program Juntos. Implemented by Toledo

at the end of his term, Juntos raised concerns about its potential for clientelism.

The worry was that a populist leader could direct Juntos at voter-dense urban

areas rather than the poorest, usually rural, areas with few voters. To prevent

this, the law establishing Juntos put the MEF in charge of determining the areas

the program covers.25 As a result, it is very diffi cult for a president to use Juntos

clientelistically since the program’s coverage is not determined by political actors.

Another important mechanism preventing change is the so-called policy-based

loans that knit policies to the approval of international or multilateral organi-

zations, making them diffi cult to alter.26 Another effective candado created by

technocrats and bureaucrats against politicians is the Ley de Responsabilidad y

Transparencia Fiscal (Decreto Supremo 066–2009), which states that in the year of

general elections the executive cannot spend more than 60 percent of the budget

before July, when the new administration takes offi ce. This is primarily an eco-

nomic law, but it also has strong political implications, for it blocks any possibility

of an incumbent’s populist temptation in the election year. This is, transparently,

a norm against politicians—even more strikingly against incumbent politicians.

Finally, international trade agreements have also become major candados.

Since the 1990s, Peru signed more than twenty bilateral investment agreements

as well as eleven free trade agreements. All of them include clauses designed to

block attempts to change economic rules in the country. Every free trade agree-

ment has a chapter on “private investment” establishing investors’ prerogative to

sue the Peruvian state before international courts if government regulations or

25. Decreto Supremo 032–2005-PCM.

26. This kind of candado has been widely used in different sectors: energy matrix, social programs,

water policy, and transport infrastructure.

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actions at any level affect their expectations for profi t. These are what the expert

Alejandra Alayza calls investors’ “super derechos” (super rights or super guaran-

tees), which protect rules regulating economic activity by effectively threatening

state authorities that consider altering them.27 For instance, according to a former

vice-minister of environment in the Humala administration, mining investors

usually invoked such clauses every time environmental requirements were dis-

cussed with them.28

Infi ltration

While the fi rst strategy focuses on preventing change through formal mecha-

nisms, the gradual “infi ltration” of people from the core of the pro-continuity

organizations (MEF and agencies close to the economic activity) to other min-

istries and agencies of the state helps the development and strengthening of the

regime. Though there are many examples of this mechanism, the latest and most

relevant one occurred in the creation of the new Ministerio de Desarrollo e In-

clusión Social (MIDIS) immediately after Humala took power. This new agency

was a key promise of Humala’s campaign and its main leitmotif of “social inclu-

sion.” Once Humala was in offi ce, he appointed a group led by Kurt Burneo—an

ally from Toledo’s party Perú Posible and unconnected with the core of the main

technobureaucracy— to create MIDIS. According to several interviews, MEF per-

sonnel detected that the proposal prepared by this group intended to diminish the

power of MEF by creating a sort of leftist counterweight to its preeminence in the

executive. While the proposal approved by Congress waited for executive ratifi ca-

tion, the MEF successfully convinced Humala to alter the plan. After dismissing

the original proposal and pushing aside the group of people that had prepared it

and who were slated to become the new authorities of MIDIS, Humala created the

new ministry with prominent former MEF cadres.29 The appointed minister was

a sophisticated, internationally renowned technocrat and researcher, Carolina

Trivelli. Moreover, even more important to our argument, her two vice-ministers

are former MEF cadres.30 In the words of Vice-Minister Jorge Arrunátegui, “Our

technical work is consistent with MEF expectations.”31 In a nutshell, MEF con-

ceded to the “leftist campaign promise” but dictated the terms of its creation and

ensured that no leftist/reformist outsiders would head such a new agency.32

27. Alejandra Alayza, interview, June 2013. See also “Nuevo marco de regulación para inversiones,”

Alerta Urgente, no. 14, November 2012, http://www.redge.org.pe/sites/default/fi les/alerta_urgente_14

_regulacion%20para%20inversiones.pdf.

28. Jose de Echave, interview, April 2013.

29. Kurt Burneo, interview, February 2013.

30. The vice-minister of Políticas y Evaluación Social is Juan Pablo Silva, who held several positions

at MEF from 2003 to 2012; and the vice-minister of Prestaciones Sociales Jorge Arrunátegui was at MEF

from 2003 to 2006 and then held different positions at Servir (Civil Service National Authority) between

2008 and 2011, including being executive president of the institution.

31. Jorge Arrunátegui, interview, July 2013.

32. Since this article was fi nished MIDIS heads have been replaced. Consistently with our argument,

the new minister is Mónica Rubio, a longtime IDB cadre, and the new vice-ministers are the former MEF

cadre Alfonso Tolmos and Paola Bustamante, also a technical cadre.

P6852.indb 172P6852.indb 172 3/28/16 2:51:17 PM3/28/16 2:51:17 PM


Other examples confi rm that MEF offi cials have infi ltrated sectors that used

to be out of their direct control. The current minister of agriculture, Milton

Von Hesse, worked at the MEF from 1997 to 2007 and after that was director of

PROINVERSION, the national private investment promotion agency. The second

labor minister in the Humala administration, José Villena, was also a former MEF

offi cial. The Ministry of Housing under Humala is led by René Cornejo, a tech-

nocrat who was a top offi cial at the agency in charge of state-owned enterprises

(FONAFE) during Fujimori’s government and manager of the successful housing

program MIVIVIENDA as well as the pro-investment agency, PROINVERSION,

under Toledo. Such examples are abundant; more and more top offi cials in min-

istries not directly related to economic activity are led by former rank and fi le of

MEF (and satellites).33 As a result, the regime’s principles, policies, and particular

know-how have expanded across the state, making the regime more stable and

homogeneous in terms of people, practices, and ideas, none of which are limited

to the economic realm any longer. Since the political class is so precarious, par-

ties and politicians have no way of stopping the expansion of the carriers of the

regime through the whole state.

BACK TO ADAPTATION

After Fujimori’s government collapse, pro-continuity actors succeeded in mak-

ing the neoliberal institution endure by adapting it to the new democratic context.

Humala’s victory in 2011 created a similar challenge. To preserve the institution,

they adapted it to a new political climate in which contemporary Peru’s most anti-

neoliberal actor had won the presidency. The adaptive capacity has been very

impressive in various ways. We will stress two of them. The fi rst one has already

been mentioned: the creation of MIDIS, which involved a great deal of give-and-

take between Humala and the forces of continuity. The new ministry and new

social programs allowed Humala to show his commitment to “social inclusion.”

However, MIDIS and the programs it has implemented represent a neoliberal

approach to social policy and thus do not challenge the regime.34 Hence, for a

second time, the institution was successfully adapted to a major change in the

political context. Environmental policies are a second example of this adaptive

capacity. Humala campaigned on an anti-mining discourse promising respect for

the environment and tougher measures on mining companies. One of the most

debated issues during his fi rst two years in offi ce was the creation of an indepen-

dent agency to supervise environmental regulation compliance. The agency was

needed since the Ministerio de Energía y Minas (MEM), which was charged with

conducting the Estudios de Impacto Ambiental, was perceived to be infi ltrated by

private mining interests (not completely erroneously). So the government created

33. Since this article was fi nished the Education Ministry has also followed the path described in

this article. The new minister Jaime Saavedra was a longtime World Bank functionary. In addition, and

interestingly enough, the former vice-ministers of MIDIS (and former MEF cadres) Jorge Arrunátegui

and Juan Pablo Silva have also landed in that ministry with the new minister.

34. On the different approaches to social policy see Reygadas and Filgueira 2010.

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the Organismo de Evaluación y Fiscalización Ambiental (OEFA), an independent

body under the Ministry of Environment. However, “ambientalistas” did not

achieve their primary goal of removing environmental impact studies from the

MEM. In fact, though the OEFA supervises the correct application of environmen-

tal standards across the government, the MEM retains responsibility for carrying

out the actual studies. In addition, this strategy was successfully linked to infi l-

tration: the president and executive director of the new agency (Hugo Gómez) is

a technocrat with previous experience in INDECOPI and Organismo Supervisor

de Inversión Privada en Telecomunicaciones (OSIPTEL), two of the islands of ef-

fi ciency created in the 1990s and linked to the MEF sphere. Again, through this

itinerant new layer of people within the state, the principles, practices, and a par-

ticular know-how spread to new realms, in this case environmental issues.

In practice, the three identifi ed strategies are used in tandem. The best dem-

onstration of them is analyzing Humala’s talks with the Spanish energy company

Repsol about acquiring its Peruvian assets, including the important oil refi nery

La Pampilla. At the end of 2012, President Humala, his minister of energy Jorge

Merino, and Petroperú’s president Humberto Campodónico were seriously con-

sidering the transaction. In April 2013, Humala met with Repsol’s president and,

immediately afterward, the executive approved regulations clearing the way to

buy Repsol.35 This attempt was Humala’s clearest challenge to the neoliberal re-

gime, giving the state an economic role by purchasing a private company. This en-

gendered a wave of criticism. On one front, mainstream media and entrepreneurs

organizations fi ercely opposed the “chavista” intentions of the government. How-

ever, according to our interviews and the most exhaustive journalistic account of

the episode, the crucial factor in blocking Humala’s revived statist impulses was

Minister of Economy Luis Miguel Castilla.36 On April 29, President Humala and

Castilla met for a crucial evaluation of the transaction. Using strictly technical

criteria, Castilla and one assistant explained to the president why buying Repsol

had no rationale (Uceda and Rivera 2013). On May 2, the government offi cially

announced it was no longer interested in buying Repsol. Castilla is now widely

perceived as the strongman of the administration. In the 2013 annual survey in

which the think tank Ipsos Apoyo asks for the most powerful people in Peru, Cas-

tilla unsurprisingly features third behind Humala and his wife.37 Hence Castilla,

who was Alan García’s vice-minister of economy, is today the most infl uential

of Humala’s ministers. The Repsol episode highlights a crucial and usually un-

noticed factor sustaining the regime and its policies: the new technobureaucracy

that possesses the political skills to convince weak politicians through their infor-

mal but powerful sources of authority.

We have shown the previously little-noticed political and institutional dimen-

35. “Conozca el reglamento de la Ley de Fortalecimiento y Modernización de Petroperú,” LaRepu-

blica.pe, April 27, 2013, http://www.larepublica.pe/27–04–2013/conozca-el-reglamento-de-la-ley-de

-fortalecimiento-y-modernizacion-de-petroperu.

36. David Rivera, journalist, interview, June 2013.

37. “Los más poderosos del año 2014,” http://elpoderenelperu.com/.

P6852.indb 174P6852.indb 174 3/28/16 2:51:17 PM3/28/16 2:51:17 PM


sions of the contemporary Peruvian institutional persistence. We argue that such

a process occurs gradually within the state because the balance of power between

pro-continuity actors and pro-change actors tips toward the alliance of techno-

crats and informal bureaucrats. They deploy different strategies to prevent change

and strengthen the regime and its policies. Among the interviews we conducted,

four were with prominent reformists that had fl eeting positions in the fi rst year of

Humala’s administration: Kurt Burneo, minister of production; Eduardo Ballón,

vice-minister of social development; Jose de Echave, vice-minister of the environ-

ment; and Ricardo Soberón, head of DEVIDA, the state counternarcotics agency.

With slight differences, accounts of their short journeys in the executive echo the

main ideas proposed in this article. All four complained about lacking the po-

litical support to implement important reforms, demonstrating the weakness of

the political class, and pointed out the diffi culties of dealing with empowered

technocrats and bureaucrats opposed to reformist politicians. Through different

mechanisms, they all quickly ended up out of the government.

CONCLUSIONS

In recent years, different researchers have criticized the fi eld of institutional

development for being too deterministic: “If the story is all in structure, . . . ini-

tial conditions, path dependence and exogenous shocks, then perhaps we should

simply sit back and let history take its course” (Levi 2006, 2; see also Weyland

2008). As a result, a new, distinctive agenda focusing on actors, strategies, and

contingency has grown in the fi eld in the last years (Mahoney and Thelen 2010).

However, this antideterministic agenda has prioritized the study of institutional

“change” rather than institutional “persistence.” A great example is Taylor’s (2009)

piece on the Brazilian Central Bank showing the institution’s gradual evolution,

in which actors and their strategies were the driving force. In this article, by con-

trast, we have shown how persistence (“no change”) might also occur through a

similar slow and gradual process dominated by contingency and actors’ strate-

gies. In our case, stability is less a matter of a long-lasting equilibrium than a con-

tingent process driven by agents’ strategies. The argument picks up Katznelson’s

(2003) suggestion to pay attention to the “micro-foundations of stability.”

Our case also speaks to the recent literature on the Latin American left turn.

After Humala’s election in 2011, Peru had the main ingredients recognized in

the comparative literature as necessary for substantive reform to neoliberal lega-

cies: absence of parties, a booming economy driven by natural resources, and the

arrival of the kind of anti-neoliberal outsider who perceives access to power as

a “now or never opportunity” (Kaufman 2011, 113). However, neoliberal institu-

tions remain in place. In this article, we have pointed out a “mechanism of mod-

eration” usually not identifi ed in that literature: unelected actors within the state.

Political parties are not the only force that can moderate anti-neoliberal outsiders;

technocrats and bureaucrats can as well. In this article, we follow recent claims

that people working within the state deserve to receive more attention as inde-

pendent variables (Dargent 2015).

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Empirically we have stressed the slow and gradual process through which

neoliberal institutions have acquired stability in contemporary Peru. We have

underlined the mechanisms permitting their reproduction. Without denying that

early stages of the institution matter, we have emphasized the process that hap-

pens after those early stages. Especially important are the unfolding changes in

the balance of power between two crucial actors: the politicians attempting to

reform neoliberal institutions and the technocrats and bureaucrats attempting to

protect them. We have also stressed the importance of the strategies employed.

Particularly, we have singled out how pro-continuity actors successfully adapted

the institution to major changes in the political context; at the same time, they

successfully deepened the principles, vocabulary, and policies of the neoliberal

regime in the economic realm and deployed them in new state agencies that used

to be outside of their infl uence. The expansion of the cohort of bureaucrats and

technocrats that see themselves as guaranteeing Peru’s recent prosperity has been

crucial to Peru’s institutional stability. Carlos de la Torre (2013) has shown how

President Correa in Ecuador succeeded in getting rid of the old neoliberal tech-

nocracy and replacing it with a “postliberal” one. De la Torre’s article offers some

clues about the conditions under which the Peruvian reproduction could stop:

empowered politicians defeating a technocracy, and bureaucracy that lost its in-

formal sources of authority when neoliberal policies stopped “delivering.” Let us

be clear, the main factor preventing important changes to the neoliberal institu-

tions in Peru is not a “formidable Weberian bureaucracy” but the precarious and

weak Peruvian political class coupled with a weak and fragmented civil society.

Finally, our diagnosis of the current Peruvian situation calls for refl ection on

the relation between unelected actors’ policies and elected politicians. In 1998,

Miguel Ángel Centeno and Patricio Silva suggested the appearance in Latin

America of “technocratic democracies”: “In technocratic democracies, elected

representatives still have nominal control over the fi nal decision-making, but the

framing of policy alternatives is largely in the hands of experts” (Centeno and

Silva 1998, 11). Contemporary Peru represents a radical version of this phenom-

enon that has perhaps gone beyond what Centeno and Silva described, in which

politicians do not even make the fi nal decisions. Whatever the answer, contem-

porary Peru seems to be another case in which political combat moves from a

decaying electoral arena toward state institutions and their unelected bureaucrats

(Ginsberg and Shefter 1990; Teles 2010). The country’s exemplary economic per-

formance of the last twelve years is in large part due to the persistence of this kind

of technocratic management, a fact that is an important source of legitimacy for

technocrats and bureaucrats. However, technocratic management may also be in-

creasingly related to the constant malaise pervading the political system. To what

extent and for how long can a precarious political class with no linkages to society

rely on a small, informal, and well-skilled cohort of technobureaucrats? Surpris-

ingly, Peruvian stability is rooted in precariousness. The emergent bureaucracy

has no basis in law, nor is there any sort of explicit policy consensus between

political parties, as in Brazil, Chile, or El Salvador (Roberts 2012), to ensure such

continuity. Although the Peruvian regime has progressively gained force, it still

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relies heavily on contingent choices and strategies and not on institutional struc-

tures, political pacts, or strong political or social forces.

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